Lesser Known Mechanics of LoL

If you watch the North American (NA) League of Legends (LoL) Championship Series (LCS), you should know about Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng. Peng is the Attack Damage carry for Counter Logic Gaming, and along with the Team SoloMid support, Alex ‘Xpecial’ Chu, won the best AD carry and Support tournament at the All-Star Shanghai event.

Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng

Peng has now written a post on the lesser known mechanics of LoL. Here are a few examples that people should work on if they want to become professional:

Range Leashing:

Range leashing is when you have a higher range than that of your opponent, and are able to keep your advantage by not giving them an opportunity to strike back. Orb-walking is crucial in range leashing.

Orb-walking:

Orb-walking is, simply, when you move between auto attacking. This will give the ability to reposition yourself in team fights while you are attacking. Attacking while moving is the most effective way to deal damage in a team fight without dying. For more information on how to orb-walk, you can watch the tutorial video.

Input Buffering:

Having an ability queued up so that as soon as the right circumstance is met, for example being within the right range, the ability will instantly be triggered. This is very similar to animation cancelling.

Animation Cancelling:

During the animation of most abilities, you may be able to cancel some if not all of the animation by using another ability or command. This will make your abilities or commands have less cast time if you have two cancellable abilities off of cooldown. A good example of this is in Call of Duty when you reload; there are a few milliseconds where your gun is fully loaded before the animation itself is finished. At this point you can switch weapons and back quickly to cancel your reload animation and go straight into running or shooting.